Cards reminisce about the legends of Backyard Baseball

ST. LOUIS -- They say never meet your heroes, but after sharing an elevator ride with a baseball legend on Tuesday night at Busch Stadium, I can’t say I agree.

If you happened to see a portly kid with a head the size of a hot air balloon waddling around the concourse, rest assured: there was no need to be alarmed.

That was just Pablo Sanchez.

On Backyard Baseball theme night at Busch ahead of the game’s planned relaunch in July, the massive size of the inflatable mascot matched the larger-than-life skill set that the iconic character brought to the video game series in the late-1990s and early aughts.

Nicknamed “Secret Weapon” -- not to be confused with the Secret Weapon, José Oquendo, the former superutility man, longtime coach and now fundamentals coordinator of the Cardinals -- Sanchez’s abilities on the diamond became the stuff of legend for young sports fans.

“I feel like everybody remembers Pablo Sanchez, obviously,” Cardinals starter Kyle Leahy said.

The definition for the golden era for baseball video games probably depends on the age of the person defining it. For this reporter, whose earliest memories as a 4-year-old baseball fan include being in the building at Busch Stadium II when Mark McGwire hit No. 62 on Sept. 8, 1998, I was nestled into the sweet spot of the Backyard Baseball target demographic.

Cardinals closer Riley O’Brien is the player on the roster closest in age to my own, so I figured he’d be a good guy to ask about the game.

“I remember, was it Pablo?” O’Brien said. He was speaking my language. “Pablo was a beast.”

Reliever Ryne Stanek was more of a Pete Wheeler guy.

“He was basically a cheat code,” Stanek said of the aptly named speedster. “You’d just put it in play and you could just rundown, rundown, rundown and take every base.”

Given the Cardinals’ roster trending in a more youthful direction this season, I wasn’t sure what the hit rate of my inquiries would be with the remainder of this group of 20-somethings.

It turns out, I’d underestimated them.

Tuesday afternoon, as the Cardinal pitchers were returning toward the dugout from their pregame work in the bullpen, I asked Leahy -- who, for reference, turns 29 years old on Thursday -- for a moment of his time.

I assured him that, if his answer to my first question was a yes, the topic I wanted to ask him about was a fun one.

Did he remember Backyard Baseball?

“That’s pretty much the only video game I really played,” Leahy said.

Oh, yeah. I had my guy.

The original Backyard Baseball game came out in 1997. When you’d play games at the hallowed grounds of Steele Stadium and Eckman Acres, the team rosters were composed of fictional characters, created specifically for the game series.

The original game didn’t include the Name, Image and Likeness for any MLB players. The developers didn’t have a licensing agreement to include MLB stars of the era until the 2001 edition.

If memory serves, that’s the version of the game I remember booting up the PC to play at my grandma’s house, which I was allowed to do provided nobody needed to use the phone.

That concept didn’t really make sense, in retrospect. I don’t recall needing the internet to play the game, but my grandma probably didn’t know that, and a rule was a rule.

Leahy was familiar with multiple versions of the game, playing the original at his older cousin’s house before convincing his parents to get him the 2005 version, which he recalled featuring standout starting pitcher Dontrelle Willis.

Of course, it was an avatar of what Willis might have looked like as a child, playing sandlot ball.

Probably the most memorable aspect of the game experience happened before the games would even begin. The playground ritual of picking teams was perfectly encapsulated in Backyard Baseball. The pregame draft was just so, so cool.

Ultimately, though, as fun as the game was to play, it arguably gave young future baseball stars some misplaced assumptions about the difficulty of playing the game at the highest level.

“I wish pitching was as easy as picking a pitch and moving the little dot to the location you want it to go,” Leahy joked. “And then, it goes there.”